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Sit-a-Long with Jundo: Zazen for Beginners (21)

— A Quiet Room.

Most days, we’d best sit Zazen in a quiet room, with little noise and few distractions. The reason is simply that a peaceful, still, quiet environment helps us allow the mind to become peaceful, still and quiet, with thoughts and emotions drifting away as the mind settles down.

But once in awhile, maybe every couple of weeks or so, I recommend that you sit Zazen in a truly disturbing place.

Today, I am sitting Zazen in one of the busiest, brightest, noisiest parts of downtown Tokyo — to make the point that the true quiet room is within us as much as out. In fact, if we always need a calm and tranquil environment in order to reach the balance, stillness, ease, and freedom of this practice, then I believe Zazen loses much of its power. It is right at the eye of the storm that one can know stillness, and in the middle of chaos that we can taste peace.

So, for that reason, I hope everyone will sit, from time to time, in a truly disturbing, disagreeable, ugly, noisy, smelly, busy, or distracting place. In a stinking garbage dump, next to a construction site with jackhammers pounding, at an Ozzy Osbourne concert, in a game room, while packed in a crowded city bus or parked in a parking lot off a busy highway.

We can drop all thoughts of beautiful or ugly, moving vs. still, noisy vs. silent, chaotic or peaceful .. and just sit as what remains
.
Following is our sitting today, in downtown Tokyo. Please join me sitting with some of the disturbance-non-disturbance in your own life.